Welcome again to Implementing Microsoft Always On VPN.
In this module, we're going to talk about deploying Always On VPN in Azure.
Now, when we consider deploying Always On VPN infrastructure in Azure,
there are a number of options available to administrators to support this.
The first is the Azure VPN Gateway.
You'll find this in the Marketplace,
and it's labeled as the virtual network gateway.
And the Azure VPN Gateway can be deployed to support Always On VPN,
but it does so in a somewhat limited way.
What you'll find is that while on the surface it sounds like a great idea,
you might find that it's limited in some aspects to
supporting Always On VPN for most deployments.
So we'll take a look at that in detail.
You might find that it works for you, but it may be somewhat limiting.
The Azure Virtual WAN is another solution that's available.
This is an extremely powerful networking platform available in Azure,
and the capabilities and features of this,
especially the scalability for Virtual WAN,
are pretty phenomenal.
Unfortunately, for Always On VPN administrators,
the story on Always On VPN support here is even more
limited than the Azure VPN Gateway,
so you may be disappointed to find out that it's not
going to be a real good solution for you.
Windows Server is another viable alternative.
You can certainly deploy Windows virtual machines in Azure,
configure them with the Routing and Remote Access role,
or RRAS role, just like we did on‑premises earlier in this course,
and you'll find that that works quite capably in most scenarios.
There is a rather serious limitation or drawback to using Windows Server,
and we'll talk about that here shortly.
Finally, administrators can use virtual appliances.
So these are NVAs, or network virtual appliances,
and again,
these are software‑based platforms that are available
from a wide variety of security vendors.
The solution of choice for you is probably available.
There's solutions from Cisco, Check Point, Palo Alto, SonicWall.
A whole host of third‑party security vendors have
virtual appliances in the Marketplace,
and if they meet the requirements for supporting Always On VPN,
those are certainly viable options as well.
One important point I want to make here before we get
started is that in this module, we're going to be focusing on point‑to‑site VPN,
or client‑based VPN.
You may very well already have an Azure virtual network gateway
deployed in your environment to support site‑to‑site VPN,
and in this module, I'm going to assume that it's already deployed.
It's just outside of the scope of this particular course to cover all the
intricacies of deploying site‑to‑site VPN gateways,
but fundamentally, there's plenty of documentation on the internet for that.
Microsoft provides great documentation for setting up VPN gateways.
I'm sure there are fantastic courses here on
Pluralsight that would cover that as well,
so I would encourage you to look at those.
The assumption here is that you've already deployed an Azure VPN Gateway,
and then I'm going to help you set point‑to‑site VPN up and configure that to support Always On VPN.